own. He worked twice as hard as a British worker, was twice as reliable, and cost half as much. Something similar could be said about Pilar, their Spanish nanny, who was looking after her two boys, Conrad and Joshua. Arabella had got Pilar through an agency. She had a qualification in childcare (in fact had a degree), a valid driving licence, could cook, didn’t mind doing her share of the housework, got on famously with Maria the cleaner, which was good because otherwise it could be a bit embarrassing on the two days they were both in the house, and, most importantly – it went without saying that it was by far the most important – was just heavenly with her two boys. Conrad and Joshua positively doted on Pilar. They loved the games she made up for them, the Spanish nursery rhymes she taught them, and her willingness to submit to local custom and cook them two different meals three times a day, since they were inflexibly committed to never liking the same food. At the moment, Conrad would eat nothing that wasn’t doused in soy sauce, and Joshua would eat no vegetables, and Pilar was an absolute genius at dealing with all that.
There was only one problem with Pilar, which was that she was going to be leaving them to go back to Spain. That was scheduled to happen just before Christmas. Pilar had told Arabella weeks before, very decently giving a full three months’ notice. She was going back to a job at a nursery school in Spain. A new nanny would begin work in the new year, but the Younts would be without any childcare over the holidays. When she had realised that and begun to think about it, Arabella had the initial flickering of an idea.
For some time now, almost everything about her husband had made Arabella cross. It had begun with the birth of Conrad, eased off a bit after he got to his second birthday, then got much worse when she was pregnant with Joshua, and worse still after he was born. Joshua was now three years old and Arabella was as cross with her husband as she had ever been. The shorthand term for what she felt was ‘competitive tiredness’. She felt she was so tired that she could not think or see straight; she felt that she began the day tired, thanks to the broken and shallow sleep she had been having now for, literally, years, and got more tired as the day wore on, and that there were times when she was running on, as she put it, ‘sheer adrenalin’; but that when her husband came home from work he had the temerity to act as if he was the one making all the effort, as if he was the one who had, by the time he got home, the right to sigh and put his feet up and talk about what a tiring day he had had! Blind! Oblivious! He didn’t have a clue! As for weekends, in some ways they were even worse. Sheila the Australian weekend nanny was very helpful (though she was no Pilar – for one thing she couldn’t drive) but there was still masses to do, and her husband did very little of it. He didn’t cook, except show-off barbecues on the occasional summer weekend at his silly boy-toy gas grill, and he didn’t wash clothes or iron them or sweep the floor or, hardly at all, play with the children. Arabella did not do those things either, not much, but that did not mean she went through life acting as if they did not exist, and it was this obliviousness which drove her so nuts.
The idea Arabella had had was quite simply to vamoose and leave Roger to it for a few days, with no warning. He could learn about looking after the children and the house by doing it for a few days, solo. While he was doing it, Arabella would be at x. x was nowhere specific, not yet, and yet Arabella had very specific ideas about x. It was going to be a luxury hotel, somewhere not exhaustingly far from London, with a spa.
Arabella was not contemplating running away for ever. She couldn’t possibly leave Conrad and Joshua. The point was to give her husband a nasty shock. Ideally, the shock of his life. He had no idea,
Beside Arabella on the floor was a pile of perhaps twenty hotel brochures. If her husband had noticed them – which assumed that he ever noticed anything – he would have thought she was planning to nag him about holidays. This would teach him. In addition the web browser on her computer had six different screens open. The current most promising candidate was a hotel in the New Forest which offered a residential package starting at ?4,000 for the two of them, though the nicer-looking package, which included a daily massage and pampering, was ?5,300, not unreasonable, Arabella felt, for what it was. The idea of luxury, even the word ‘luxury’, was important to Arabella. Luxury meant something that was by definition overpriced, but was so nice, so lovely, in itself that you did not mind, in fact was so lovely that the expensiveness became part of the point, part of the distinction between the people who could not afford a thing and the select few who not only could, but also understood the desirability of paying so much for it. Arabella knew that there were thoughtlessly rich people who could afford everything; she didn’t see herself as one of them but instead as one of an elite who both knew what money meant and could afford the things they wanted; and the knowledge of what money meant gave the drama of high prices a special piquancy. She loved expensive things because she knew what their expensiveness meant. She had a complete understanding of the signifiers.
The tricky thing could be friends: you needed friends who felt the same way. And who had the money to act on the feeling. Luckily, Saskia was one of them. She had been dumped by her shit of a husband eighteen months before but had cleaned him out in the divorce so she was more than good for her share of it. For this sort of adventure she was perfect. Clicking around the website, Arabella thought this New Forest package looked by far the strongest candidate yet. They had availability. She picked up her mobile phone, flipped it open, and said ‘Saskia’. The phone rang four times.
‘Babes!’ said Saskia, who was thirty-seven.
‘Darling!’ said Arabella, who was also thirty-seven. ‘I think I’ve found somewhere down south. Shall I read you all the porn or just book?’
‘Darling, you know I trust you.’
‘Cool,’ said Arabella, who without thinking about it had stood up and moved across to the mirror in what she called her dressing room. She often went to look at herself when she was speaking on the phone; when she was in the street and took or made a phone call she would stop in front of a shop window and consult her reflection. Although Arabella was conscious of her appearance, careful with her clothes and her blonde highlights and tentatively interested in cosmetic surgery, her skin always the same very faint golden colour to set off her hair, this habit was not vanity but an occasional, sudden, vertiginous loss of self, brought on by the experience of talking to a voice over the airwaves, and not a person in the flesh. When talking on the mobile she needed these occasional reminders that she was still actually there, and it was this unconscious need which underlay this habit of needing to look at her reflection. ‘I’ll go ahead and book,’ she said, turning her face from side to side and keeping eye contact in the mirror. ‘I’ll send you the deets. Big kiss.’
‘Love you lots,’ said Saskia, who then broke the connection. Arabella moved back to her computer and started to fill out the hotel booking form. From downstairs she could just hear the sound of three voices, in three familiar tones: Conrad was making an accusation, Joshua was raising his voice to drown him out, and Pilar was interceding between them. But it was not a ‘go to’ noise and Arabella had no difficulty in ignoring it. Then Arabella heard something which got her full attention: the flap of the letter box opening and closing, and a thump of mail landing on the doormat. It sounded as if there were some catalogues there; and Arabella loved her catalogues. She opened the door of her dressing room and came down the stairs as quietly as she could, making a mental note to have Bogdan look and see if there was a way to make it less creaky. Catalogues! Arabella bent and picked up brochures from two different travel companies – that was in case she finally got her husband to agree to go to Kenya for February half-term. There were a couple of uninteresting-looking letters for him, a credit-card bill for her, and a postcard with no addressee other than their house number. Her first thought was that this was an unsolicited offer from an estate agent: these came through at the rate of two a week and she enjoyed being irritated by them and the compliment they paid to the desirability of her house. Arabella noticed the postcard carried a second-class stamp; no one she knew used second-class stamps. The printed text on the card said ‘We Want What You Have’. The postcard was a photograph of their front door. It must be a viral ad thing. There would be a follow-up and then another card finally revealing the point of the exercise as some semi-criminal estate agent finally confessed to a wish to sell her home for her. Arabella took the catalogues and the card upstairs, the catalogues to read and the card to keep for the rainy day when they decided to sell up and get somewhere bigger.
7
At ten o’clock Shahid was stacking unsold men’s magazines behind the counter, prior to returning them to the
